Chapter 63
LUCIAN
The world is red.
Not from the blood on my hands, though there’s plenty of that. Not from the emergency lights still pulsing outside the ranch. It’s red because I can’t see anything else. Not Scar’s men clearing rooms, not Mason barking orders - none of it.
All I see is Nadia.
Still.
Cold.
Barely breathing when I left her with the medics.
And Kellerman.
Kellerman is slumped against the far wall of the basement, hands zip-tied behind his back, mouth swollen and split from the first hit. There’s blood in his teeth and smugness in his eyes. He looks like a man who’s convinced he’s untouchable.
He’s wrong.
I crouch in front of him, elbows on my knees. I want him to look me in the eye when I end him. “You’re going to tell me everything,” I say. My voice is calm, too calm, the kind that only comes when you realize you have nothing left to lose but your rage.
He grins - or tries to. “You think you scare me?” His tone is hoarse but still carries that sick superiority of a man who’s spent too long thinking his white coat makes him untouchable. “You have no idea the kind of men you’re messing with.”
“Doubt it,” I say, and drive my fist into his jaw. His head cracks against the wall. He coughs, spits blood, and keeps smiling.
My knuckles split against his face before I even realize I’ve swung again. He hits the floor, cheekbone blooming red. I haul him back up by the throat, his feet scraping against the tile.
“What did you feed her? What the hell did you put in her veins?”
He gags, gasps for air. “Relax,” he coughs. “It wasn’t poison. A mild sedative. Hallucinogens. Dopamine stimulants. The good stuff. I wanted her pliant, not dead.”
I freeze, disgust clawing up my spine. “Why? Why would you drug her like that?”
He tilts his head, eyes glassy but still full of arrogance. “Because she’s brilliant,” he says simply. “You think I was going to kill her? No. I needed her. Her mind. The things she could do in the operating room. She would have been my partner, once the resistance wore off.”
My grip tightens. “Your partner?”
“In private work. Off the books. No restrictions, no ethics boards. We could have changed the world, she and I.” His voice takes on a manic edge, the words spilling faster. “We could have saved lives that were never supposed to be saved. You don’t understand what we were doing here…”
“Oh, I understand perfectly,” I cut in, low and deadly. “Organ farming. Black market transplants. People who never made it out alive so you could sell what was left of them. That’s your miracle work, isn’t it?”
He laughs again, but it’s weaker this time. “Call it what you want. Everyone profits. Hospitals, senators, insurance companies.”
“Not her.” My voice rips through him. “She didn’t profit. She was another one of your goddamn experiments.”
“She was chosen,” he rasps. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to touch genius? To shape it? She was going to change medicine. She was going to help me perfect it.”
I spit in his face. The sound is wet and ugly. “You didn’t want to perfect medicine. You wanted to play god. You turned her into your lab rat, and when she fought back, you broke her.”
He smiles through the blood. “She broke herself. You can kill me,” he wheezes, “but it won’t change the fact that your little girlfriend did it to herself.”
The words slice through the room.
“What?” My hand freezes midair.
He smirks, teeth pink with blood. “That wound. The one you’re so upset about. She stabbed herself. I didn’t touch her.”
For a moment, my breath stills and the air goes dead quiet.
A part of me knows it’s possible.
A darker part refuses to believe it.
“You’re lying,” I snarl, grabbing him by the collar and slamming him back into the wall again. “You pumped her full of enough drugs to screw her head sideways. You did this to her.”
He laughs, low and breathless. “She wanted out. I just… facilitated the moment.”
That’s the last straw.
I slam him down onto the ground, straddling him as my fists find their rhythm - cheek, jaw, temple. Over and over until the bones give way beneath my knuckles. Until his laughter stops. Until the sound of his breath turns into a wet rattle that barely qualifies as life.
“You think she’s just another body?” I snarl. “You think you can cut people open and still sleep at night?”
He doesn’t answer. His eyes are rolling now, lips twitching in something that might’ve been a grin if he still had the strength.
I grab a handful of his blood-slick collar and haul him up one last time, forcing him to look at me. “You took everything from her. From me. From every family that buried an empty box because of you.”
He wheezes, “You’re just like me.”
“No,” I whisper, pressing the barrel of my gun to his temple. “I don’t experiment on monsters like you. I end them.”
The shot is loud.
Final.
Kellerman’s head snaps back, and he slumps to the floor. A single drop of blood splashes across my sleeve, warm and dark.
For a long time, I just stand there - breathing hard, chest heaving, the world ringing in my ears. The rage drains out slow, replaced by something heavier.
Grief.
Because he may be right about one thing - that she did this to herself. Maybe not by choice, not fully, but through despair. And now, I’m the one left holding what’s left of her hope.
When I finally climb out of that concrete hole, they tell me she’s in recovery, that her pulse is “stable for now”. Her chest is moving. Faint. Shallow. But it’s moving. For a stupid, holy second my knees go soft and I have to brace myself against the wall to stop from collapsing.
I can’t breathe through it. Can’t think past the image of her split open on that table.
Blood in her hair.
Her hand slipping out of mine.
That look on the doctor’s face when he said if.
I don’t believe in if.
I believe in cause and consequence.
In pain repaid in equal measure.